Rebecca Kunz

Haus Hardstrasse 43

Rebecca Kunz (b. 1986, Bern), who lives in Basel and Bern and successfully completed her Masters degree in 2018, has an ongoing interest in manipulation. Rather than leading the viewer into the art object, her radical spatial interventions turn this relationship on its head. The interlocutor is thrown back upon him or herself, to find themselves in a variety of (spatial) situations.

Rebecca Kunz’s works don’t allow passivity. They demand active appreciation; they demand openness and acceptance — and, ideally, active engagement as a consequence of new experiences. There is no ambling through familiar spaces. Rebecca Kunz’s spaces are inescapable, they irritate, are nearly entirely empty and are radical. Basel, in 2018: for the graduation work for her Masters degree the artist, who was born in Bern, rented a building with several stories on Hardtstrasse. The building was vacant for a short period and Kunz carried out some subtle and some more obvious interventions there. Halls and passages became dead ends. Light conditions were changed. A view outwards, which might allow spatial and particularly temporal orientation, was not possible. ‘Spending several months in the interior I had darkened for my last project, Haus Hardtstrasse 43,’ says the artist, ‘I noticed how the building slowly became part of me. The building and I merged ever more into each other. The atmosphere in the spaces coloured my mood. A space is the starting point of my work. If I spend enough time there — alone, if possible — the space dictates which tracks I should follow, which architectural and spatial details I should concentrate on and which are less important.